Hans Week 2020, Day 7 - Free For All
“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us and sometimes they win.” -- Stephen King
“A once innocent child, abandoned, now driven by vengeance, rejection, and longing.” -- Tales from the North, A Nordic Folklore Series by Anna Bridgland
“I’ve been searching my whole life to find my own place.” -- Frozen, 2013
In Scandinavian folklore, the myling or utburd are the restless spirits of children who were abandoned in times of poverty and famine or for being born out of wedlock. They haunt the rivers, forests, and mountainsides where they were drowned or left to die of exposure.
They are said to attack those travelling alone at night, pouncing onto their shoulders and clinging with inhuman strength, demanding to be taken to consecrated ground and buried. However, the myling would grow heavier with the unlucky traveler’s every step, eventually crushing or suffocating the very person who could have laid it to rest. If sunrise drew close and they hadn’t yet reached consecrated ground, the myling would become enraged and snap the traveler’s neck.
I associate this creature with Hans for two reasons. First, Hans is strongly implied to have been an outcast in his family, although his was an emotional rather than a physical abandonment. Second, for me, what is so striking and so tragic about tales of the myling is how their rage at being abandoned has twisted them so much that they lash out and injure or kill those who could help them by giving them a proper burial -- a final resting place or home of sorts, and I see a similar sort of tragedy in Hans’s story. One could interpret his choices and actions as his having become so twisted by his upbringing and the desires born of said upbringing that he, like the myling, very nearly killed someone who had been quite willing to love him and in doing so, destroyed a very real chance of finding his own resting place or home.